


Waltz Klavier

by inkycompass



Category: Final Fantasy V
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2019-09-24 14:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17102705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkycompass/pseuds/inkycompass
Summary: Four light warriors confront their futures after the battle at Castle Exdeath.





	1. Bartz

Bartz brushed himself off and shot a piqued look at the pages that had hustled him and Krile out of the entrance hall. It wasn't the way they held their noses that offended him. Castle Exdeath had permeated his clothes and his skin and even his socks, a foul reek of brimstone and rotten flesh that had lost nothing on the trip between planets. No, what itched him were the Chancellor's words. How many times had they been to Lenna's house? And it turned out he was still just an acquaintance.

Still, at least the pages were hustling him into a room that had a bath in it. Bartz poked a toe into the steaming water. He preferred cold rivers and lakes, but clean was clean, and he grabbed the soap and the brush once he'd inched himself into the water. Grime sloughed offf his skin like geological strata as he scrubbed and eavesdropped on the attendants' conversation.

" _Good God, where have they been taking our princess? The smell is worse than the you-know-what!_ "

" _At least it's over now... except she's still got those scruffy people with her. Why?_ "

" _Don't say that about Captain Faris! He's our princess now too!_ "

" _That's different. Faris was never_ scruffy _. Unless you're suggesting that old man was a king!_ "

" _He turned up on that meteorite, remember? They wouldn't let just anyone travel on one of those things._ "

Bartz almost laughed out loud. There was no way Galuf would have let that pass without yelling something back at them. Bartz wished he was here so he'd know if Galuf would announce his title or just turn the air blue in generalized indignation.

He wished Galuf were here at all. 

He'd made sure _they_ were, the four of them. Sent them on while he left. Bartz sighed. Well, they'd done what the old man wanted, and that was that... at least that's what it looked like. They'd stormed Exdeath's castle and beaten him up good, and the beating they'd taken in turn left no doubt that the fight had been real. Exdeath had said he'd return the world to how it "used to be," whatever that meant, and things here didn't look any different than the last time. But Bartz couldn't draw a straight line between defeating Exdeath and waking up in Tycoon. He would readily admit if anyone asked (not that he expected it) that he didn't know what he was doing. What he did know was that Exdeath had pulled a fast one on them too many times.

To Bartz's relief, it was his own outfit that lay across the clothes rack, miraculously restored it to its original colors. Seemed like they'd done it by turning into cardboard, as he discovered when he pulled the stiff fabric over his head and tried to twist around. He glanced at the tub, wondering if he had time to beat the starch out of everything, when another page appeared with a brush and a comb and a bottle of... something. The boy's neatly slicked-back hair told Bartz what it probably was. "Nope, I'm good." No point in loading his head down with a bunch of grease when he'd just got it clean, after all. He ruffled his hair with both hands until it felt right and stepped out into the hall, looking around. "Where's everyone else?"

"Oh, Their Highnesses are still preparing for tonight's celebration," said the page. That figured. By the look of them, the chancellor and Jenica probably had fifteen years' worth of ribbons and bows to wrap around Faris. Bartz rubbed the back of his head. For months now he'd set out of every inn and tent with three other people. This wasn't an inn or a tent, but it felt kind of weird all the same, standing here on his own.

On his own...

"Hey, what about Krile? Is she with them?"

"That young girl?" said the page. "Oh no, she's done. She's waiting in the upper parlor."

"Alone?"

"Well, of course," said the page, taken aback by the sudden sharpness. "It will be some time before the princesses are ready, and there are any number of preparations to be made--"

Bartz made a noise of frustration at the bottom of his throat and marched away. Geez, didn't anyone here wonder why Krile had turned up and Galuf hadn't? Or why she looked like she'd been dragged face-first through a war, just the same as him and Lenna and Faris? Nope, it was some random girl who was hanging out with the princesses for no reason at all. They'd just dumped her any old where as long as it was out of the way.

Actually, she was a princess too, wasn't she?

Not that it made a difference, really.

Bartz found the upper parlor without any difficulty. After such a long time as Lenna's acquaintance, he knew the place pretty well. "Hey."

Krile started. She looked a lot cleaner, at least, and even if she wasn't princess-level fancy they'd given her a new hair ribbon. She smiled as she looked him up and down. It might have been his imagination, but there was something of relief to her expression. "Wow. I can't believe they got all that dirt off of you."

"How'd they get it off you? You had just as much. _And_ more hair." Bartz put out a hand to ruffle it, grinning when she batted it away.

"Maybe I'm just better at getting clean." She turned back to the tapestry she'd been staring at and traced the embroidery with one finger. "I had no idea Lenna and Faris came from such a wealthy kingdom."

Wealthy? Bartz looked at the hanging again. "Yeah, I guess so. All the castles here look like this." Walse and Karnak had the same kind of stuff had all over their walls. And Bal and Surgate had too--no, maybe not, he decided. What decorations there'd been had been there probably as long as Galuf had been king, old and faded things. That was down to the crystals--the crystals and the way they'd exploited them, Bartz thought with a pang of guilt. At least the people on Galuf's world had _tried_ to keep them safe. 

He stared at the top corner of the hanging, itself showing a blue crystal picked out with silvery threads. He shut his eyes and heard it shatter. It'd happened enough times to memorize the sound--all eight crystals reduced to the fragments that sat in his pockets. Violins and woodwinds echoed from the stone as Tycoon's musicians tuned up for the evening. They were back on their homeworld, when they thought they'd never see it again, they'd beaten Exdeath, his castle had vanished... but those words echoed more strongly than the orchestra's practice. _Have you any idea what I plan to get away with in the first place?_

Bartz tried to figure out how this might fit into an evil plan. What reason would Exdeath have to send them all home? 

Actually... not all of them. Now Krile was the one stranded in a different world. She hadn't even jumped into it like the three of them. He thought of asking about it. It had probably occurred to her by now. Bartz looked down at her. She'd drawn closer, and it was easy to drape an arm around her shoulders. A lot easier than figuring out what he could say to her about everything.

She'd insisted that she would fight with them, hadn't even given them time to protest, though Bartz wasn't sure if he had been going to protest or not. If he had, he wouldn't now. She'd proven herself dozens of times over in Castle Exdeath, and not just because Galuf had given her his strength. But if it was really all over and they'd won... Bartz wondered what she would do with no grandfather and no way home. 

Lenna and Faris would probably stay in Tycoon. Maybe Krile could stay with them, but what would she do around here? What the heck did people do when they lived in castles? Back when his dad had died, Bartz had just walked away. It was what Dorgann had wanted. He tried to picture Krile walking off into the wilderness, but... geez, there was no way Galuf wanted that. There'd been something fundamentally _rooted_ about that old man, and not just because his ghost had spoken through a tree. 

But picturing Krile as a resident of Tycoon, not quite in the right place, always secondary to _their_ princesses... that didn't sit right with Bartz either.

He'd have to figure something out.

He nudged her a little. "We'd better head downstairs before they drag us there."

"Yeah, you're right." She giggled. It was a nice thing to hear. "I can't wait to see how Faris looks as a princess."


	2. Krile

The chancellor of Tycoon had arranged a meal for them as soon as they were cleaned up--a suggestion of Lenna's, but Krile had a feeling that he was glad to have an excuse not to sit them down next to Tycoon's aristocracy. Grandpa probably would've made a fuss over it. Krile didn't care. She was happy to sit at the table in the royal apartment and wolf down bread and cheese and vegetables, but she gasped when she saw the spread they'd laid out for her and Bartz. Hesitantly, Krile picked up one of the steaming rolls. "It's warm!" She grinned at the page. "It was nice of you to put it in the oven for us."

"Excuse me, but that bread is baked fresh," said the page, scandalized. "I know the chancellor can be--but we wouldn't serve old bread to friends of Princess Lenna!"

Krile broke the roll open. The scent that rose from its soft white interior made her mouth water. She snuck a look at Bartz, already digging in. Ravenous as she was herself, Krile found herself working her way slowly across the plate as each bite overwhelmed her senses. The sprouts crunched between her teeth and burst with seasoning and butter. The green beans jumped away from her fork, too crisp to be speared. The pork was moist and unsalted, and even the rosemary had a sweetness to it as though just picked today. No parsnips pulled from months of storage, no sharp tang of pickling, nothing mixed in with spices and mush to make a scrapple that would keep in the dungeon chill. It was all _fresh._

When she'd plied Grandpa for the details of his adventures, he hadn't mentioned this. And Bartz said Tycoon wasn't that wealthy. If this was just an informal meal here, what were Walse and Karnak like? Her fingers dug into the crust of a second roll. All this abundance, it had only been made possible by the crystals. Now those crystals sat as fragments in the pockets of her jacket. Maybe it had been like this thirty years ago on her own planet. They said it was lush and plentiful before Exdeath's emergence from the forests of Moore... and then, just like that, it hadn't been. That was a matter of history to Krile; it all happened long before she'd even been born. But she had heard stories, from Grandpa and from others who had lived through it. The people here would have to learn about hardship, and they would have to learn fast.

Just like she was learning, very fast, how to live in a world without Grandpa in it.

It wasn't the thought she wanted to have, but that thought, and others like it, rose from her heart whether she wanted them to or not. Of course she'd mourned before. Her parents were still officially missing; though she'd been too young to remember much of them, the pain when she'd understood why the wind drake arrived alone still ached sharply in her memory. There had been other deaths since then, soldiers killed in monster attacks or on sorties to clear out their nests. There was Xezat, and Grandpa's grief for him. None of them, not a single loss nor all of them together, had prepared her for Moore. Because with all of them before, Grandpa had been there.

She kept eating even as she thought all this. The food was here, and she wasn't going to waste it. 

They were led to the throne room, decked out both in mourning and banners. Krile saw the look on the Chancellor's face. Her heart went out to him. She didn't know if Tycoon understood the magnitude of the disaster about to break over them, but they didn't need any help to understand what they had lost in King Tycoon. Yet they had chosen to celebrate Sarisa's return instead of sink into sorrow. She had to do the same.

...Krile had time to think through all this because Faris clearly was uninterested in actually stepping into the room. Krile glanced at Lenna, waiting wih the patience of someone who had all the time in the world, as the muffled voices of Faris and the Chancellor filtered through the door. Evidently the Chancellor prevailed, because the door opened and in stepped Faris.

Krile's jaw dropped. 

It _was_ Faris, she realized after a moment. There was that straight back, the sailor's arms that had been left exposed by the dress, those eyes as blue-green and ruthless as the sea. Krile gaped at her. Lenna laughed in delight. And Bartz--

"Oh-Oh! She's gorgeous!" he exclaimed. Everyone's head snapped up, staring at him. He didn't seem to notice. "Yowza! She really is"

Krile giggled at his brick-red face. Of all the reasons to wish Grandpa was still here, she'd just found the first. It wasn't _fair_ that he had to miss this. "Bartz, I do believe you're blushing!"

"I--I'm not!"

The look that Faris gave him promised murder as she stalked over to the throne and sat gripping its arms. Krile grabbed Bartz's elbow to tug him out of the way of the couples arriving to dance. They whirled around each other gracefully, leaving Bartz and Krile to watch from the side. She didn't know this kind of dancing, and she doubted Bartz did either, but it was very pretty. And Faris was very pretty, however disgruntled about it she might be, and Lenna looked happy for the first time since Krile had met her. It was time for celebration, the chancellor had said, and he was right. Krile had her worries, but they would keep another night, surely? She ought to put them aside. The feeling grew from somewhere at the bottom of her heart, but she concentrated on the dancers, whirling in their steady one-two-three motion determined to be joyful over the return of Faris. 

The feeling didn't want to be ignored. It grew and it twined around her thoughts. Krile took a deep breath, refusing to feel it. _Not now._

Someone prodded her in the back, right between the shoulders. Krile spun round, indignant. But there was no one there; Bartz was zoning out as he watched the dance. And then it happened again, stronger. She put a hand to her shoulder. It wasn't a physical sensation. It hadn't come from someone who was here. Not in body. 

Over the music, she heard it--the echo of an echo. The same as she'd heard in Castle Exdeath before Kelger and his warriors had stripped its illusion. Krile shut her eyes, hoping to see what she'd seen then, but there was nothing but the warm color of her eyelids. He'd stopped poking at her. He'd done his job. The anxiety he left wouldn't be ignored any longer.

Krile stared at the whirling dancers, at Lenna and Faris on their thrones, all as though nothing bad could happen again. They were wrong. Krile took a step back. They were very, very wrong. Nobody in here could tell her anything about it. Nobody in here had the slightest idea. She spotted the door to the balcony. Outside... outside she could take a breath, she could listen to something besides this dandified bustle. She rushed across the carpet and pushed open the door, pulling cool evening air into her lungs. Castle Tycoon was nothing like her home, but stone was stone even in this world, steady and solid beneath her hands. 

She turned her eyes up at the sky with its strange array of stars. All her life the nights had been lit by the planet she stood on now, a blue-green marble in the deep darkness. When she'd been just a little girl, Grandpa had told her about his journey across its surface, a brief pursuit of Exdeath brought to a swift conclusion. He brought back different and longer stories fom his second stay, told as they'd sat beneath the wind drake's sheltering wing in brief moments of respite as they prepared the army to storm Exdeath's stronghold. Where was her planet? She ought to be staring at it now, trying to pick out the deserts of Gloceana and the Big Bridge that spanned the continents. But she saw nothing but stars, and a strange patch of inky black that cloaked the sky directly overhead.

Grandpa had weakened Exdeath, and so they had fought him and survived... and defeated him? No. No, they hadn't. Even the Dawn Warriors could only seal him away. All four of them together at their prime couldn't destroy him for good. Exdeath might be down, but he wasn't out.

A warm hand landed on her shoulder. Krile jumped--she hadn't even heard the footsteps behind her. 

"Krile... how're you holding up?"

She looked up at Bartz. "All right... it's not so painful anymore, but..." She hesitated. This was still about Grandpa. How could she explain it? "I guess I just feel anxious. It's like Grandpa is fussing at us to hurry." She couldn't quite meet his eyes when she said that, not knowing how he'd react. He wouldn't think it was a flight of fancy, right? Not after everything that had happened already, but... everything seemed so over now, so done. It did to everyone here. It had to her until just a few minutes ago. They were at a party, for goodness' sake.

"Mm..." He squeezed her shoulder. "I think I get it. Let's check it out."

Krile's head snapped back up. "Huh? What?"

"We're back in my world. There's gotta be a reason for that, right? Let's find out what it is."

Krile smiled right from her heart. Grandpa wasn't here anymore, no. But this had been his family when he was lost on this planet. He had passed that onto her just as much as his strength. Bartz had noticed her leaving... he hadn't turned up in that big empty parlor by chance, either. He just brushed aside every reasonable worry as easily as when the only cure for her wind drake was in a place so dangerous no one had survived to return... _Guess that means we'll be the first who do!_

"Okay!"

But that smile faltered when Bartz made for the great double doors to the courtyard without a backwards glance. That wasn't right, was it? Krile stopped and tugged at his sleeve. "What about the girls?" she hissed, looking towards Lenna and Faris at the far end of the hall.

He shook his head. "No way they can slip away, so..." He looked down at Krile, shrugged in resignation, and turned to go. Krile didn't follow. They couldn't just leave them behind, could they? Not afer everything they'd gone through. A fussy chancellor didn't seem like a good enough reason to just ditch Lenna and Faris. But... Bartz was almost out the door. And it wasn't like they were leaving forever, after all... she and Bartz would find out what Grandpa was pestering them over, and then they'd come back, and set out all together again. That was it, Krile told herself as she hurried to catch up. 

Bartz put his hands on his hips as they stood at the top of the stone steps, already considering what to do. "Boko might still be in that cave to the west..."

Krile looked at him quizzically. Grandpa hadn't ever mentioned that name. "Boko?"

"He's my prized chocobo--and my best friend."

In spite of the situation--because of it--the picture of Bartz sitting astride a bird like a sack of flour sent her into a fit of giggles. "Oh, really?"

Bartz drew back with an indignant expression. "What, you don't believe me?"

"Weeelllll... you're so poor at riding wind drakes...."

"Hey!" He gave her a playful shove. "You little--"

She laughed and shoved back. It was supposed to be a little shove, a playful one. But she was expecting her arms to be her own arms, not Galuf Halm Baldesion's, and before she knew it Bartz sailed into the railing. She gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. Then she glared at the dark sky. _Grandpa!_

To her enormous relief, Bartz just pushed himself up and shook his head, grinning ruefully. "Geez, I can't win against this kid."


End file.
